


This Is Not The Promised Land

by Tozette



Category: Naruto
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, M/M, Pre-Slash, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 06:55:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13758681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: Kakuzu is an alien fleeing a destroyed planet. He lands on Earth, and sets about extracting money from humans in exchange for various feats of life-saving and disaster relief.And Hidan? Hidan likes mayhem. Mayhem and Kakuzu.





	This Is Not The Promised Land

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SyndellWins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SyndellWins/gifts).



> Way back in... possibly December or early January, because I have forgotten, tumblr user [syndellwins](http://syndellwins.tumblr.com) sent me [ this prompt](https://syndellwins.tumblr.com/post/168702886067).
> 
>  **edit** : 24/02/18 - I've been rightly corrected on my attribution of this prompt. The post containing it was @ed at me by syndellwins but the prompt itself was written by [thatshipcat](http://thatshipcat.tumblr.com) who should definitely be recognised for coming up with most of the plot here. I'm sorry I didn't include her blog link when I first posted.

When Kakuzu first gets to earth it is strange and unpleasant. He hates everything about it not because it's inherently detestable but because it isn't like home and he resents it. The air is thin and the colours and light are wrong -- the star they are orbiting is too young, by comparison.

Humans are... all wrong. They look similar enough to his people that it's a shock to notice the differences -- there're no patterns on their skin, and they have strange eyes. Their body language is vastly different and their bones and... pieces... are fragile. 

They don't much like him, either. The first and last time he talks to one of their physicians she calls law enforcement. She's never seen someone with more than one heart before. 

No wonder they're weak. 

At first he's... unmoored. He has very little of any of the world's currencies. He has nowhere to live unless one counts the pod he escaped in. He has his body and his hands and the dark mass of tentacles thumping away in his hearts, and that's about all.

He starts helping the humans with their disasters almost as a form of self defence. They have earthquakes where he lands first -- bits of the ground beneath them rattle and grind and topple their buildings and destroy their infrastructure. They trap them inside, they crush their fragile bodies. 

The humans rebuild in the _exact same spots_ , as though they are incapable of learning from their history, and for reasons that escape Kakuzu. There are empty spaces on this planet where the very ground doesn't conspire against them, but humans are... very human.

Earthquakes are not new to him, and they are not that difficult to work around. Kakuzu is much less fragile than the average human.

The first time, Kakuzu casually bats even the biggest pieces of falling debris away from himself and makes it through the city, paying close attention to the chaos. He leaps lightly away from collapsing sections of road as they crumple. The whole city bucks and twists and deafens him with the screams of tortured metal, and for the first time in years he almost feels normal. 

When the dust settles across the grey and brown wreckage of the city there's crying and screaming and complete mayhem.

Later Kakuzu figures out that humans have a physiological and social response to other humans' stress, which is absent in Kakuzu's people. The humans' specific feelings differ, but the intensity of their response is the same. In a situation like this one, every one of them is suddenly operating at maximum energy output all at once.

They work together surprisingly well in a crisis, actually. Kakuzu's species requires extensive training to do this. The humans communicate astonishingly well with each other, band together as they need to -- in six people lifting a slab of concrete to access a watermain, he's finally seeing why they're the dominant species on this stupid planet. 

"I can lift that," he says to a woman in an emergency medic's uniform -- a paramedic, here. For some reason, the humans tend to die when you take the weight off their crushed limbs, so a medic needs to be there every time. Kakuzu doesn't understand it, but then, humans are fragile. 

The man they're apparently rescuing is shorter than Kakuzu (most are, here), and pallid and has very pale hair, which they call blond. Humans come in lots of colours that would not be possible on Kakuzu's home planet. Anybody born as pale as this sweating, swearing man would just die of sun exposure. 

"Just cut it off," he's saying, spitting at the paramedic. "It's fucking crushed, just cut it off."

The paramedic is calm and steady, but Kakuzu can see her pupils dilated and her breathing coming too fast -- at the time he thinks she's attracted, but later he understands that all humans, however outwardly calm-seeming, exhibit this intense arousal in response to conflict, severe suffering, and danger.

"You'd have to be an Olympic weightlifter," she says dubiously to Kakuzu, pushing her hair off her face with her forearm. Hers is darker, cut closely around her face. But she is still too pale.

He doesn't understand the reference. He blinks once, slowly, and then he reaches down one-handed and lifts away the biggest piece of rubble that's pinning the white man to the ground. 

"Fuck!" Roars the man, jerking under the sudden pressure change, and he starts screaming and swearing and does not let up. 

The medic's eyes go wide. "Can -- shit. Can you hold that?"

Kakuzu shrugs. The rubble shrugs with him, and the man screams again.

Kakuzu has no physiological, or social, response to his pain. It's loud, though, and that he doesn't like. He twitches. 

The man gets moved, carefully, by a number of medics who swarm the area, and he's still swearing and yelling as he goes. Kakuzu watches, and then relaxes his fingers and drops the rubble. It's not really that heavy, but humans are weak.

 It makes a big bang when it falls. It vibrates along the ground underfoot, and more than one person nearby goes tense and wary and freezes as though they think the earth will start shaking again. It doesn't.

"Hey. Hey, can you do that again? Lift things like that?"

Kakuzu turns toward another uniformed man. It's a different uniform, a law enforcement uniform. Or... Military, perhaps. 

"Yes," says Kakuzu. 

"Great, we need--"

"You'll have to pay me," he adds. 

The rescuer pauses and gives him what is either a... happy? look or an incredulous look. Kakuzu can't read it and he ignores it anyway. 

He has priorities.

 

* * *

 

He makes a name for himself. Mostly it's "Kakuzu". His name means, he learns, 'corner capital' in one of the many human languages. He's pretty sure he's the only one with the name in the entire city. 

Receptions vary. Plenty of people seem to shrug and say 'that's the free market for you -- if they wanted help badly enough, they'd pay.' But there are a lot of people who seem to think Kakuzu is 'profiteering' and 'benefiting from the suffering of others', which is true -- but they keep saying it as though that should be inherently bad. 

Besides, the humans' dominant economic system is basically predicated upon suffering. It seems weird that they get so upset about Kakuzu doing the same thing, just because it's a little more... direct.

Kakuzu is sure he has transgressed some basic social rule, but he suspects it's of etiquette rather than ethics. Maybe humans just don't like to express these things directly.

"Money won't make you happy," someone tells him once. He doesn't realise at the time that it's a common platitude. 

On this occasion, the disaster is an enormous, completely unpredicted downpour that strikes the city fast and flash floods it -- and as Kakuzu walks on top of the filthy water, he passes a woman clinging to what looks like a broken fridge. 

She is one of the many people Kakuzu doesn't rescue, because nobody pays him to rescue them. 

"No," he agrees with her, and keeps walking. There's a smell rising from the water and people are struggling and calling out to one another. It's still dark and raining overhead, and he is just as wet as anything else even if he's not been submerged.

Happiness isn't in Kakuzu's future. He doesn't miss it, as far as he knows.

He sees people in clumps -- on balconies, on roofs. It is long, messy work, and almost nobody actually has any cash. He realises he needs to start bringing a card scanner with him, he thinks, but would that even work in the wet?

"KAKUZU," bellows a voice, and Kakuzu turns toward it -- a pale man, sitting on the cab of a truck, kicking his bare feet in the rising water. 

Many people know Kakuzu's name now, but this one is... Oddly familiar. 

It takes him a moment, but then it clicks.

"You still have your leg," he says, more out of surprise than particular concern. 

The man looks down, like he's forgotten and has to check. "Yeah," he agrees. Then his mouth twists in a way Kakuzu can't read. "That's what you call providence."

He has a blithe smile, and eyes whose pupils are a reddish pink -- almost the same colour as the sclerae of Kakuzu's eyes. It's familiar, in a way. 

He doesn't seem distressed. Still. Money is money, and it doesn’t matter who it comes from. "You need help getting somewhere?" 

"Aw. Out of the goodness of your heart?"

"No," says Kakuzu. He has several hearts but none of them exhibits any moral leanings. "For money." Sometimes he has to be very, very clear with humans. 

"Yeah. Greed's a sin, you know," drawls the man, still grinning, kicking his foot through the water again. It's at his ankles now, steadily rising, grey-brown with who knows what. It splashes toward Kakuzu, but he's too far for it to connect. 

'Sin' is a concept Kakuzu is familiar with, although he attributes it to other things. It’s complicated, here on Earth.

“Money is really all that means anything.” Especially now, and especially here. “If you don't need help, what are you doing out here?"

"You’re going to go to hell with that attitude. Mmm... Well, a heathen probably wouldn't get it," he says seriously. "I came to watch. Saw a guy drown forty minutes ago. Freaking out and coughing and waving his fuckin' arms. He saw me, too--” he gestures toward his eyes, miming the eye contact they must have had briefly. “-- and then he's under and his little fingertips are scratching at the top of the water.” He punctuates it with a low, satisfied sound in his throat. 

Then he tugs his necklace out from under his collar. Underneath the big red hoodie, the man's wearing no shirt. His skin is very white and smeared with dirt. 

The pendant gleams in the light of the overcast sky. Kakuzu has seen that symbol, but not on Earth. Not yet. The Cult of Jashin isn't compatible with the culture of any human civilisation that he's yet seen.

...The humans are even less cohesive than he thought. 

"Imagine choking on all this shit," he adds, kicking again at the water. It splashes. "Just -- all up in your mouth and your throat and filling up your chest while you try to breathe, breathe, breathe--" he cuts himself off with delighted laughter.

"And what," Kakuzu wonders, ignoring the explanation, which makes as much sense as anything a Jashin cultist has ever said, "will you do when the water rises above the top of the truck?"

"Swim. Or drown." He shrugs. Then he cracks a smile again, broad and gleaming and deranged with the rain streaming down his face. "Or drown, then swim."

Of course. 

Kakuzu shakes his head and turns away. Whether or not that man needs his help is debatable, but either way Kakuzu's pretty sure he's beyond it. 

"OI, KAKUZU," roars the voice behind him, and he pauses but doesn't turn. "The name's Hidan."

Hidan. 

...Fine.

Kakuzu grunts, and he doesn’t care if Hidan hears it or not. 

If that idiot doesn't die, Kakuzu might see him again. They live in the same city, after all.

 

* * *

 

He does see Hidan again. 

He sees Hidan all the goddamn time. 

He's there when someone summons a dragon to the city and Kakuzu gets his very first mayoral payment for saving everyone -- which he does by dropping the power lines on it and lighting the scaled behemoth up. 

It’s six stories tall and covered in rock hard scales, all of which are smoother than glass. It breathes poison and eats any flesh, all flesh, just -- flesh. It does so voraciously, and its teeth are very big indeed. 

When he finally brings it down, it takes out a mobile phone tower, two houses, three cars and a playground. Kakuzu regards it as a success. 

Hidan is there.

"Nice," Hidan says, chewing on a hangnail. He is watching from the balcony of an apartment Kakuzu is very sure he doesn't own. He doesn't know where Hidan lives, but it's nowhere so expensive as this place. 

It’s still standing, though, except the letter boxes, so he supposes it’s a perch well picked on Hidan’s behalf. 

“Aren’t you worried about being poisoned?” A casual observer might consider that to be worry for Hidan’s health, but in truth what he’s really saying when he asks so flatly is ‘why the hell are you here, bothering me, when you could be literally anywhere else?’

“Not gonna happen,” Hidan dismisses, with suicidal unconcern. “City’s gonna be pissed off about the damages,” he adds, with completely unnecessary relish. Kakuzu doesn’t give a damn about the damages, but Hidan’s glee is... out of place. “I bet they’ll try to take it out of your pay.”

Kakuzu grunts, bending low over the twitching and charred body. It's big and scaled and smells like overcooked snake. There's nothing mystical about it when it's dead -- it's just so much meat. 

He cuts out its heart. He might need it. 

"They'll pay me," he says, standing up. His hands are gold with dragon blood and the street is stained in a wash of metallic colour. 

Hidan laughs. “Or what?” he prompts. 

Kakuzu gives him a hard look. 

His next laugh is breathless and positively giddy, like the potential for violence is something that fills him up and steals his breath and gets him high. It may well be. Kakuzu’s heard things about the Cult of Jashin. 

The city, here represented by a skinny balding mayor Kakuzu would dearly like to forget, does try to take it out of his pay, despite the negotiations that took place well before Kakuzu engaged the dragon. The mayor, it seems, is indeed annoyed about the damages. 

"People live here, Kakuzu," he says chidingly, and he commences with the hand-wringing and rapid blinking nervousness and swallowing noisily, like he’s torn between terror at Kakuzu’s towering, bloodied person and terror at losing face. 

It is a conversation that lasts twice as long as it needs to, assuming it needs to happen at all.

Kakuzu is unsympathetic. Some terrors are more immediate than others, so he gets paid in full. 

Generally speaking, Kakuzu takes his time. He sets up his own business -- money, when one has it, turns out to be a thing that one can turn into more money. Kakuzu can get behind that concept, even though he knows he's adopting a value system that's self defeating.

He settles in. Buys an office building. Making money is both his profession and his hobby. He eats and he sleeps -- badly, with memories of a planet that doesn't exist drifting in technicolor behind his eyes -- but otherwise, Kakuzu dedicates all his time to it.

There's nothing else left. And he doesn't mind it, anyway. Money is... Very reliable. 

He doesn’t refuse when he’s called to help whenever the next catastrophe or disaster strikes, because it remains reasonably lucrative -- as long as he’s personally ready to debate the matter with the mayor first. But it does take time away from more important things, and each time he has to leave his desk and his backlit screen and the soothing air-conditioned hush of his office, he grinds his teeth with steadily increasing resentment. 

There must be actual humans who can do this, he thinks sourly, even though he knows there aren't. 

Hidan is... also reliable. Oddly. He's there when the next earthquake hits, and once again he's not a rescuee - just a bystander, although this time he's wandering through the dust and the chaos and snapping pictures on a heavily-taped smartphone. 

"Smile, Kakuzu," he calls out, while Kakuzu is dragging a corpse from beneath the debris of a broken wall. Something in the body snaps and the rescue worker he's working with flinches for reasons that escape him.

Kakuzu turns his head, peels his lips back and smiles widely at Hidan and his busted up camera phone. His mouth spreads wider and wider, showing off too many white teeth, and although that expression doesn't mean at all to a human what it does to Kakuzu --

\-- Hidan laughs, loud and wild-eyed, and perhaps it means the same thing to Hidan, after all.

Maybe.

The rescue worker makes an appalled noise in the back of his throat.  

Kakuzu focuses on the task at hand and his pay cheque, and he loses track of Hidan. The picture never makes it onto the internet. Kakuzu doesn't know what he does with it -- and in hindsight, he’s not sure he wants to know.

It is natural, arguably, for Kakuzu to run into Hidan fairly often -- Kakuzu makes his living emptying the city's coffers every time there's a disaster, and Hidan is like... some kind of connoisseur of human suffering.

He's not sure their paths should cross this often, but --

It is what it is, he supposes. 

Natural coincidence. 

Except it’s not, is it?

He figures it out on a Tuesday. Kakuzu is working at the office when he realises how quiet it is inside.

It's a shared space now -- his is a small room with clear fibreglass walls, but space in the city is expensive, so outside his own office is a floor of desks and cubicles he rents out. 

Kakuzu gets in at about four in the morning for contact with the international traders, and eight o'clock usually brings a powerful irritation as other people trickle in, bleary-eyed but annoyingly chatty. Not annoying enough that he won't take their money, of course, but annoying enough that he occasionally thinks seriously about spiking the water supply. 

(Humans are a very chatty species. They anxiously affirm and reaffirm their social bonds. They never stop. Kakuzu's people were... not like them. 

Although Kakuzu's people are largely dead, so it's possible that the humans are on to something.)

(...Something _annoying_.)

But it's nine now and the whole place is silent but for the soft whir of the air conditioning. That isn't quite right. 

Kakuzu frowns. He checks, first, that it's not one of these arbitrary 'weekends' or 'holidays' but the calendar says it's a normal working Tuesday. Hmm.

He leans back from his computer, cracks his neck and stands. He doesn't like it when the humans chatter, but he likes it even less when they all mysteriously decide things in tandem without his knowledge or notice. Sometimes it seems like they have a goddamn hive mind. 

He listens more closely. Distantly he can hear someone yelling. It's outside though, he thinks. Kakuzu has very impressive soundproofing in the office. This is because he hates the sounds of cars, construction, plumbing, phones, human or earth animal voices in general, trains, planes and, selectively, fun.

It's awfully dark for nine in the morning, actually. 

On a whim, he pulls back the curtain behind him and looks out the window.

There he discovers the underside of an enormous black spider. It is big enough to blot out the sun. 

It has a reddish spot on its underbelly, where the legs all seem to join up. It looks like an unholy eye, or possibly the mouth to the hell Hidan keeps mentioning. 

It scuttles on after a second. The spines on its legs -- soft-seeming hair on its smaller cousins, probably -- scrape on the window as it goes. He can't hear it, but he can see the marks it's leaving.  

Once it moves off and he can see where it's been, Kakuzu can see another, even larger arthropod... gnawing? Possibly? On the tip of the building across from him. 

"Huh," Kakuzu mutters. He cracks the window. Outside, he can very distantly hear that the humans are screaming. Things are breaking.

It's weird, because usually...

After a second checks his phone. 

It's muted. There are fourteen missed calls. 

He glances at the computer behind him, then conscientiously saves his work and backs it up online. There's no call to tempt fate. 

Then he hits the dial button.

"KAKUZU," shrills the mayor on the first ring. "Where have you been?"

"Working," he says shortly. He wonders sometimes if the mayor has noticed that he has an actual job, which he works at quite diligently, and which does not involve saving the city from any monsters. He doubts it. The mayor, in Kakuzu’s experience of the man, prefers only to notice things convenient to him. 

"There's giant spiders eating the city," he shrieks. 

Kakuzu angles the speaker away from his ear. The mayor hits a certain pitch when he's having hysterics, which is ...often. 

They're not really eating the city, exactly, he thinks. There's a little gnawing going on, but honestly the giant spiders seem more interested in the humans down there. Those, they'll eat. As he watches, one of them scurries aggressively after a big yellow bus. There's a lot of screaming, faint and high. They're like frightened meals on wheels.

"Yeah," he agrees, after deciding that he is more interested in expediency than accuracy. Time is money, after all. 

"I could kill them," Kakuzu offers, just to get the ball rolling. The mayor is likely to yell and sob for a bit before he gets around to the magic phrase 'I would like to pay you for your services' otherwise. He's not a direct man. Even for a human. 

"Yes!"

He sizes up the spiders. They're big. Bigger than Kakuzu. Most of them are about the size of a lorry. And they're fast.

"Ten grand a head," he says, and immediately regrets how generous he's being. Especially when he thinks about whether or not they're venomous. Shit. He could have gone twenty, easy. 

"T- ten thousand--!" 

There is sputtering, but humans will do that. It isn't much of an indicator to Kakuzu as to whether they mean yes or no. But it's hard to tell if they need clarification or they're just making noises. 

"Yes," he says, judiciously. It's best to be clear.  

"There's at least forty of those things! You'll bankrupt the whole city!"

"The economic impact of losing the entire labour force is going to be much greater than my bill," Kakuzu points out patiently. Forty of them. Probably one after the other, too. He should definitely have said twenty grand. 

"Kakuzu," wails the mayor, "You live here too!"

Kakuzu is silent. One home is more or less the same as another. They're all human and strange now. The sun's all wrong, too distant and cool, and the light is the wrong colour and the days are the wrong length. Kakuzu could live in any city on the planet and still feel restless and resentful. 

This is the only city on the planet that seems to be ready to explode every other Friday, of course. And it’s also the only city to have a Hidan, but Kakuzu isn’t sure if he considers that a redeeming feature or not. 

It’s certainly a feature.

"I don't work for free," he says, when his silence doesn't seem immediately effective. 

"I can't possibly-"

"Fine. Not interested," Kakuzu says, and hangs up.

The phone rings again four seconds later. He considers for a second, then answers. 

"Putting you through," says the mayor's assistant shortly. She sounds strained. Giant spiders is probably a bad day at the office for her, but this one is remarkably efficient and resilient. No small talk, all business. He has a distant hope she'll last. 

There's a beep and a click. "Kakuzu," says the mayor again, drawing his name into a whine. "I didn't say we wouldn't pay you, just, how about --"

A spider darts over the window again. Its huge hairy leg puts a crack in the glass, and suddenly Kakuzu can hear everything at full volume. There's a lot more screaming than he thought.

"--five, five thousand is -- council is still going to kill me, actually, but--"

"Twenty," Kakuzu interrupts whatever the mayor's saying.

"What," says the mayor.

"Tweny grand. Each."

" _That isn't how negotiation works!_ " wails the mayor. 

"It is when you have no other option," Kakuzu points out. "Or did you want to be known as the mayor who failed to act when your city was under attack?"

There's a long, unhappy pause. 

"Kakuzu, if you miss a single one of them," says the mayor grimly, in a voice suddenly gone hard and absent of pleading. 

Kakuzu feels his mouth curve into a 'smile'. Among his own people it is a threat of violence, not an expression of joy -- it stretches the long skinny marks that grow over their skins and narrows their eyes so their sclerae show only in flashes of red. It is a very threatening face. 

Kakuzu is adaptable, though. Here and now, when he smiles he means both things. It is a threat of violence, and he is going to enjoy it. 

"I won't.” 

* * *

 

Despite the reasonable pay, the work is foul, stinky, messy and dangerous. The spiders come with built-in armour just like any creature with a hard exoskeleton, and at their size it's at least as thick as the bigger human bones in most places. 

He lands on the first spider as it scurries below, and his impact sends it sprawling with its dark, hairy legs flung out on either side. He isn’t sure what the important bits are in spider anatomy, but all eight of its eyes are in the front part of the cephalothorax above the chelicerae -- that seems promising. So in the end, Kakuzu kicks the first spider in the face until his leather shoe and the cuff of his trousers are both covered in fluids and the body has stopped moving voluntarily. Its legs curl inwards and when he leaves its head is caved in and its contracted limbs make it look about half the size it was. 

There are still so many to go. Kakuzu draws on the thick dark tentacles that throb with the rhythm of his hearts, spooling them out around him in the air, ironically rather like a spider casting silk for a web. He uses them to trip up long stiff-haired legs, to twist and wrench joints until their outsides snap and their insides leak out. 

Humans run past him or around him sometimes, even as Kakuzu tries to climb over or dodge past overturned vehicles and dead spiders. There are still cars on the street, some driving and weaving around the obstacles, and some with passengers who are staying still and hoping the spiders won’t notice them if they curl up in little metal shells on the roadside. Kakuzu isn’t sure if either is a good idea. 

The spiders might not be very clever but they are very, very fast.  Kakuzu underestimated how fast exactly when negotiating back up in his office. He leaps out of the way of a long spindly limb, which then slams into a telephone pole and leaves a dent in the metal casing. Another crashes into the ground behind him, and a third he hears puncture the wheel of an abandoned car. He twists sideways fast enough to avoid the sudden stabbing fang above, and then makes a flying leap to dodge the squealing tyres of a car as it hurtles past. The driver is screaming. 

He rips a spider leg away with one long tentacle, twisting the limb where the femur joins the cephalothorax. He wrenches it free with a spray of something hot and foul-smelling, and then while the spider flinches and makes an unearthly noise of pain, he tosses it aside and sends his own tentacles knifing for the exposed fleshy part where it came detached. The alien sounds only increase, but once the exoskeleton is breached the spider has little defence -- Kakuzu scrambles its insides, rips his threads free through its thick skin, and leaves it curling and heaving in the road. 

He smells like giant spider guts. It’s ugly. 

And he keeps going.

He thinks it’s the thirtieth one that actually bites him, although it’s a little hard to keep an accurate count when there are so many distractions. Thirty twenties is six hundred, which means he's being fairly well compensated for his efforts.

He is distracted by the glitter of shattered glass spilt across the road and he steps where he shouldn’t. A broken manhole cover begins to give way beneath him. Kakuzu stumbles sideways, goes left instead of right, and almost throws himself right into the path of the spider he’s trying to kill. 

The cut of its fangs is almost negligible next to the icy burn of the venom.

Kakuzu puts his hand through its belly with a crunch and starts pulling things out, heedless of what they are. It struggles and hot fluids rain down upon Kakuzu, but he's seen what the venom does and he knows it _must die_  before he loses consciousness. 

Kakuzu did not survive the destruction of his entire planet just to be eaten by a fucking spider.

He can feel its legs kick and curl in protectively even as his vision is going dark. It's a relief when the body starts jerking and twitching. It won't be long, and he... 

And he...

He can hear his pulses in his ears, all five of them, thundering off beat.

Unconsciousness is black and painless. 

He wakes, which is less pleasant, being bright and painful instead. Hidan is there. That is a thing that happens. 

"You again." The venom stings but he's lucid. He struggles up. Hidan does not stop him.

His eyes rapidly adjust. The room is dark, but there's light filtering in through a broken window. He doubts Hidan has crocheted pillowcase covers on his couch. The dwelling's owner probably got eaten by spiders.

He rubs his head. It hurts. He hit it somewhere. Outside there's still crashing. He must have missed some before he... 

Before he was bitten. Yes. He fell unconscious on the ground outside. He's remembering that correctly, isn't he? Then how...

He's still covered in spider goo. It still smells, and it's still wet even though it's colder now. It can't have been too long since he blacked out. His trousers are torn around the cuffs in a way he thinks is consistent with dragging.

"Hey! Hey, is that any way to talk to someone who saved you?"

"You?" Kakuzu wants to sound disbelieving but actually he can picture that clearly -- Hidan dashing through the panicking people, voracious spiders and general destruction, probably jumping around acrobatically and almost certainly screaming like a loon. 

And Hidan is wearing nearly as much spider innards as Kakuzu.

He asks the other question without waiting for an answer. "What the hell are you doing here?"

Kakuzu staggers to his feet. His head and belly are rebelling. But there's a lot of money riding on those spiders and he told the mayor -- that hysterical whack job -- that he'd get them all. He breathes.

"Aa. Well, there's no point if I don't have front-row seats, is there?"

No point, Kakuzu thinks, and he twists his mouth and looks sideways at Hidan. That implies to Kakuzu that there's a point to these catastrophes and attacks, a mind behind them to give them purpose, but that's -- 

"Are -- are you doing something to make this shit happen?" Kakuzu asks, feeling stupid. He feels stupid, but he knows the Cult of Jashin, they're not -- they're not of Earth, either. He wonders for the first time if Hidan is human.

"Of course," says Hidan, like he's astonished Kakuzu doesn't know, instead of just confirming the wildest possible guess Kakuzu might have made. "The earthquakes and floods are just, you know. You help them along a bit. But the _dragon_ \--"

"And the spiders," Kakuzu adds, rubbing his shoulder. The venom still hurts. At this rate he's going to need to replace one of his hearts. He can't use a human one, but he still has the one he took from the dragon. He licks his teeth, annoyed. 

"--and the spiders," Hidan nods. 

"Why? That's got to be a criminal offence among humans." Admittedly, he hasn't actually read any laws against summoning dragons but he's pretty sure it's somehow assumed. It's at least _implied_. 

"So what? Governments can decide to write down whatever they like," Hidan scoffs it like not only is it irrelevant, but Kakuzu is being stupid in pointing it out. He sighs like Kakuzu is disappointing him. "The only law that matters -- the only law we're truly beholden to -- is the law of Jashin-sama."

Of course. And that neatly explains why he's doing it too. Mayhem. Suffering. It's like a spiritual treasure trove for Hidan out there. But --

"Yet you came and got me when I fell," Kakuzu points out. He keeps one ear out for the mess outside. It's less pressing now that he knows he's talking to its originator. More spiders are unlikely to appear from nowhere while Hidan is busy with Kakuzu. "Isn't that against your religion?"

"Aw, Kakuzu, are you worried about my soul? That's unexpectedly nice of you." There's a teasing edge in Hidan's voice, only a little bit cruel. He slumps against the back of the couch. There's a crocheted throw blanket there, and it looks strange next to Hidan with his unearthly eyes and his thin coating of spider innards.

"Are you --" he stops. Then, "You're doing this in this city just to fuck with me," Kakuzu says, abruptly but -- but certainly.

Hidan smiles. It's wide and happy and completely crazy looking.

His expression says it all.

That's why he's there every single time -- he's not just chasing disasters to get off on them, he's _causing_ them, and he's causing them specifically so Kakuzu has to drop everything and fix them. Hidan's the reason he has to keep talking to the stupid histrionic mayor. Hidan's the reason he'll need to replace the window in his office. Hidan's the reason his shoulder hurts and his head is pounding. 

"Took you long enough, didn't it?" drawls Hidan.

Kakuzu balls one big hand into a fist. His lips peel back to show his teeth and he means no joy or good cheer with it. When he speaks, his voice drops to a bassy rumble he hasn't heard since his own planet was destroyed. 

"I'm going to kill you," he says, and he means it as he says it. There are no fancy threats, no embellishments or hyperbole. It is flat and unadorned and it feels very, very true. 

"Ha!" Hidan laughs so hard he snorts. "Like that's even possible, Kakuzu!"

"We'll see," he growls, and launches himself at Hidan at top speed. 

Hidan is too fast for him -- for now.  The couch topples over backwards and slams into something that tinkles with breaking glass, and then Hidan is flying past Kakuzu.

He dodges under Kakuzu's second, corrective swipe and then he's out the balcony door -- wood splinters, more glass scrapes underfoot -- and whooping wildly as he disappears into the city.

The spiders are obstacles now, not goals, and the city is just the setting for a fight Kakuzu knows he can win.

He bares his teeth, snarls low, and gives chase. 

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked anything in particular, let me know in a comment. Otherwise have a good morning!


End file.
